author
Letitia M. Burwell
Best known for a memoir of girlhood in antebellum Virginia, this 19th-century writer left behind vivid, deeply personal accounts of plantation life and memory. Her books are still read today as firsthand documents of the world she came from, even as readers approach them critically.
2 Audiobooks
A Girl's Life in Virginia before the War
by Letitia M. Burwell
Plantation Reminiscences
by Letitia M. Burwell
About the author
Born in 1831 and dead in 1905, Letitia M. Burwell was a Virginia writer from the Burwell family. She is identified in reference works as the eldest daughter of William M. Burwell, and her family home is associated with Avenel in Bedford, Virginia.
She is best known for A Girl's Life in Virginia Before the War, published in 1895, a memoir-like recollection of her childhood before the Civil War. Bibliographic sources also list another work, Plantation Reminiscences, and both books remain available through major public-domain archives.
Burwell's writing is often valued for its detailed picture of domestic and social life in the antebellum South, but it is also shaped by the outlook of the plantation class and is commonly described as part of the Lost Cause tradition. That makes her work important both as storytelling and as historical evidence of how some white Southern writers chose to remember the past after the war.